Lying About Sex

We know how to stop AIDS and how to treat it. Yet it is the biggest epidemic in history. One reason is that our culture equates sex with sin so we learn to lie about our sex lives.

In fact we learn to pretend we don't have a sex life.

Anyone who learned to count can calculate the hypocrisy.

There are six billion people in the world and only one historical claim of virgin birth. This means there HAS to be a minimum of 150 million UNSAFE sex acts a year, 410,958 UNSAFE sex acts per day.

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But anybody who gets AIDS from sex is seen as guilty. Otherwise how can we have "innocent" victims of AIDS like babies and hemophiliacs: they are "innocent" because they did not get it sexually.

Hypocrisy kills.

All these married people that bought millions of tablets of Viagra last year try to tell young people not to do what they each do on average twice a week.

When these folks try to put abstinence in sex education, it undermines any belief young people might have in the honesty of the message. They know the message is NOT about having the power to say no when you want to say no. It is a moral judgment against you when you say yes because you want to say yes.

If our leaders admitted that we need and have sex (God knows they do!), we would be spending research dollars on finding lubricants that kill the AIDS virus so that people can have sex without fear. These lubricants, called microbicides, are the most underfunded but most promising research there is in HIV.

If we were honest about our sex lives, we would talk more openly.

We would find out that one reason some people have unsafe sex is that they cannot keep a hard-on if they use a condom unless they get Viagra, and Viagra is not paid for by most insurance and Medicaid. In fact neither is birth control, because sex is sinful to some, and trivial to others.

If we were not hypocritical, there would be no judgment about having HIV. So more people would get tested, treated, and be far less likely to transmit. Transmission comes primarily from those who do not know their status.

Shame about our sex lives creates a chain of infection -- married men who are secretly bisexual, or having affairs, or using prostitutes; teenagers who don't have access to good information because their sex class is about abstinence; even research priorities that leave out the most important question of all -- what kind of sex is safe? Congress defunded this research fretting it might promote more sex.

We have two enemies -- the virus and hypocrisy. Of the two, hypocrisy is the real killer, because we know how to tame the virus.

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